From the archives of the Catholic Herald, July 17, 1953, here's a terrific article: some great English Catholic history, and a sermon from Msgr. Knox.
FAITHFUL SQUIRES
HONOURED
Papal Delegate
reopens famous Lulworth Chapel
The memory of the Catholic squires who kept the embers of
the Faith alive in England through the twilight years of the 18th
century was honoured on Saturday and Sunday at Lulworth Castle in Dorset, the
ancestral home of the Weld family.
Lulworth Chapel was the first Catholic church to be built
for public worship. It was here that Bishop Walmesley, Vicar Apostolate,
consecrated the first member of the Hierarchy of the United States, Archbishop
Carroll of Baltimore, on August 15, 1790.
The chapel has been redecorated and restored as far as
possible to the original state when it was built by Thomas Weld in 1786, and
Archbishop Godfrey, Apostolic Delegate, reopened it by consecrating its altar
and singing Pontifical Mass.
Request to King
Bishop Grimshaw of Plymouth and Bishop Parker of Northampton
assisted at the ceremony, and Mgr. Ronald Knox preached.
To build the chapel Thomas Weld sought the personal
permission of King George III who, when at Weymouth, often visited him at
Lulworth Castle.
The restoration, based on two sketches by the original
Georgian architect, has been carried out under the guidance of a former
president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Mr. H.S. Goodhart Rendel.
It is now flooded with light from the large Georgian windows
which have been inserted, and the interior is a glory of white, green and gold
decoration, with a blue dome.
Col. Joseph Weld, the present squire, has been responsible
for the whole enterprise, and tribute was paid during the week-end celebrations
to his generosity and to the fidelity to the Church in the long and unbroken
tradition of his family. The Bishop of Plymouth described him as “a model
Catholic layman.”
The altar was re-consecrated because it had been moved in
the restoration, to its original position.
New signature
In a recess in the altar is a document written in 1786 by
Bishop Walmesley certifying the authenticity of the relics enclosed there.
On the reverse side the document bears an endorsement
written by Bishop Collingridge, who re-consecrated the altar when it was moved
in 1809, and Bishop Grimshaw has now added his signature to record the latest
ceremony.
A treasured link with the penal days – a chair reputed to
have belonged to Fr. Hugh Green, one of the martyrs of Chideock in Dorset – was
brought from Chideock to be used by Archbishop Godfrey. At the Elevation at the
Pontifical Mass on Saturday and again on Sunday when Bishop Grimshaw was the
celebrant, seven trumpeters of the Royal Tank Regiment sounded a fanfare from
the gallery.
Dom Charles Pontifex, Prior of the Ealing Benedictines, to
whom Col. Weld has lately given the pre-Reformation Bindon Abbey ruins a few
miles from Lulworth, was present, and the Society of Jesus, with which the Weld
family has had close ties since Thomas Weld gave them Stonyhurst, was
represented by Fr. Fitzgibbon and Fr. N. Dennis, of Bournemouth.
The Cistercians were represented by Fr. Eugene, chaplain to
the nuns of Stapehill Priory in Dorset.
Gesture of faith
Pontifical Mass was celebrated by Bishop Grimshaw on Sunday
in the presence of the Apostolic Delegate and a large gathering of relatives
and friends of the Weld family, including Lord and Lady Clifford, Lord and Lady
Iddesleigh and Mr. Alfred Noyes, the poet.
Mgr. Ronald Knox said in his sermon on Sunday: “Today, like
our brethren all over England, we Catholics of the West are celebrating the
martyrdom of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More – a Cardinal and a great
English layman.
“Here, with a more intimate sense of nearness to the events,
we are also celebrating a gesture of faith made 250 years later.
“It was in the year 1786 that a great English layman, Thomas
Weld of Lulworth, laid the foundations of the church in which we stand – and perhaps
on that occasion one of the altar boys would be his eldest son, a boy of nine
years old, who was destined to achieve the purple.
“From Thomas More to Thomas Weld – what a fascinating
interval of Catholic history is bounded by those landmarks.
“Fifty years of struggle, during which it was not apparent
whether the old order would not reassert itself against the new; then 100 years
of intermittent, unrelenting persecution, during which the Faith was kept alive
by heroic resistance; then – more sad than either – 100 years of slow decline,
during which the Catholic body, no longer persecuted but still disabled,
discouraged and shouldered out, dwindled almost to nothing, only kept alive
where a handful of Catholic squires – Welds, Petres, Blounts and the rest of
them – still practice in secret the medieval rites of long ago.”
Then converts came
“At Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire you can still make your
way into a Catholic place of worship that dates, they say, from 1730; but it
nestles at the back of the squire’s house so that you mistake it for a dairy or
a laundry.
“Thomas Weld built out in the open; the last despairing
gesture, you might conceive, at a doomed and still un-emancipated religion.
“Gossip tells us that his friend King George III counseled him
to make it look like a mausoleum, a mausoleum perhaps of the old Faith which
had been on its death bed since the days of Thomas More.
“But it was not to be. Scarcely more than half a century had
elapsed when the Oxford converts began and the Church emerged from her twilight
…
“Today, when the piety of a later generation has done its
best to make Lulworth what it was – not by laborious word-for-word imitation of
the past but by recovering and re-embodying its spirit – today let us be glad
to remember those old 18th century Catholics and to pronounce their
epitaph.
“Theirs was the task, neither easy nor glorious, of
preserving what was left of English Catholicism in a time when persecution was
dead but freedom still tarried and the love of many had grown cold …”
Like cricketers
“May we dare think of those very English forbears of ours in
terms of a peculiarly English sport and say that they were like cricketers with
no hope of victory and playing out the innings for a draw?
“When evening comes there shall be light, but only the faint
glimmers of it were showing when Thomas Weld made his act of faith in the
future.
“On his soul and the souls of all his kinsfolk that have
gone before us may Our Lord have mercy and raise up still in his family worthy
descendants of a great name.”
